His Banner Over Me Is Love
by warriorhope
Summary: He thinks about him in church sometimes


**Notes:** For the Kummer Summer exchange based on this prompt "post-Rumours/New York, so Kum friendship; Sam thinking about Kurt the way he probably shouldn't. It may be longer fic with plotline or just description of what's going on in Sam's head (in 2nd case it may be or may not be masturbation, but I'm more interested in emotional side of it)." I tried to focus more on Sam's personal and growing admiration of Kurt as a person combined with his religon (tho masturbation is sort of mentioned too). It's set the day after Prom. I don't know if it's exactly what she wanted, but I hope she likes it. I'm not sure I like it.

Sam thinks about him in the middle of a Sunday sermon.

Not in that way (that was saved for a few precious moments in the bathroom in the morning when his parents were already out looking for work, but Stacey and Stevie weren't awake yet, that he tried not to think about the rest of the day). No it wasn't sexual. Perhaps, a bit sacrilegious (Sam never really seemed to know anymore). It wasn't like thinking of different things then he was supposed too during the sermon was a new thing for Sam. Before, it had always been whether Batman would be able to beat Spider-Man in a fight to the death or how to get back his quarterback position though.

Something pulls on his shirt's sleeve (a leftover from Regionals, the only somewhat formal clothes he had anymore). He looks down and sees Stacie pointing at her hymn book. He nods and quickly stands up grabbing his own. He turns to the page Stacie is opened at and grins down at her giving her a thumbs up. She covers her giggle behind her hand like she had long ago learned to do in church and goes back to singing.

Sam tries to sing the first few bars of the song, but is distracted by the image of an angel in the stain glass of the right side of the alter, coils of blond hair and red wings. Most of his life he'd always imagined angels to be like her or maybe Quinn even. But lately the only person or thing that came to mind when he thought about angels was Kurt Hummel.

If he dared tell anyone they would have laughed him. Kurt Hummel, kindest person in the world to his friends, but fearful towards his enemies, angelic? He didn't even believe in God (as Santana had told Sam once during one of the more peaceful day in their relationship), so it's not like he would even find it particularly complimentary. All Sam knew was that when he heard the word the angel all he could think of was clear gray-blue eyes.

The first thing angels always say to humans is "Fear not". Apparently, their beauty and glow was so terrifying that helpless shepherds always cower back in fear. At least that's what his mother told him.

Sam wishes Kurt had prefaced their first conversation like this. Though to be fair, he didn't have his guard up in the first minute. It had been really nice actually. A member of his new club had come to introduce themselves individually to him and even wanted to do that week's assignment with him. Him! Sam was used to being picked last for any kinda of school assignment anyways (outside maybe gym class), and as his first week, he fully expected to do his assignment alone, especially since Puck was in Juvie. And yet here was this person who wanted to sing with him.

But at the same time there was the questions about his hair. How had he even figured it out? Sam didn't think it was that obvious especially back then when it was mostly an even and consistent colour, and his roots weren't coming in at the was kinda of intimidated by that. The hair wasn't the only thing. Once he saw though Sam's attitude Kurt would've been able to see that he was the world's biggest dork and other things he rather not think about (namely some of the things he thought about Finn Hudson back then in the bathroom every morning).

"Maybe you are straight."

"Wait, what?"

"Never mind. Rent it and then look up the menu for Breadstix online, because we are going to win this."

As he walks away, Sam touches the place on his arm Kurt's fingertips brushed against. He's not sure if he intimidated, glad or just confused. Maybe a bit of all three. He just knows that for some reason, Kurt Hummel could see through his act.

Stacie reaches up to pull on his shirt signaling it was time to sit down again. He smiles at her again. Despite being the youngest of three children, she always watched out for her more absentminded brothers, especially in places like church. He wonders who she'll be like when she grows up. Maybe like Kurt, or Santana, or Quinn.

Not such bad thing, he thinks looking over at Quinn. He didn't care about what people said about her, she was a good person (despite what she had done to him last winter). She had found out when his mother had asked if she could look through the donations box for Stevie and Stacie (all they had was their winter clothes). His parents had a lot of pride and held out on telling anyone they knew until they were desperate. Quinn was manning the booth that day by some horrible coincidence. Sam had look down at the stained carpet the entire time and didn't stop looking at the ground until they got to the parking lot. Quinn had came by the motel room (she managed to ask his mother enough questions about their situation to figure out where it was) with the money she had got from selling the promise ring he had given her and some of her old clothes for Stacie. He was pretty sure he just hugged her for an hour after that.

The choir starts to sing and Sam tries not to wince. They weren't exactly the best in the world, or maybe his time with New Directions had just given him higher expectations for choirs. Which was odd considering he had sort of wanted to sing in choir when he was younger in Tennessee, but never went through with it. Sometimes, Quinn sang with them and it was a little better, he guessed. He looks up at the angel in the glass again and wonders what Kurt would sound like. He smiles crookedly, not that Kurt would ever willingly walk into the church.

After school on the day he was first introduced to Kurt, Sam had gone up to his room with the intention of checking his email before he started his homework. He remembered how Kurt had said something about looking up the Breadstix menu online and typed in the url for that too. He wasn't expecting any email, to be honest. Yet there was one. With 60 attachments. Not even looking at who sent it, he clicked on it and pressed on one of the attachments, an audio file.

The song surprised him. It was "I want to Hold Your Hand", but with a different arrangement then the version he usually heard. Instead of a fast upbeat song about first love, it was slow and contained a kinda of sadness deeper than any puppy love could produce. At first he thought it was Faith Hill because it reminded him of when he was little and he would sit in the kitchen with his Mom, or drive to the grocery store with her. Back then, she loved Faith Hill and used to listen to her music everywhere. But after about a minute he realized it was someone else.

It was probably what subconsciously implanted the idea of angels into his mind.

As soon as the song ended Sam was already clicking on the next link. None of the songs after that quite brought out the emotions the first song had brought out in him, but they bring out other emotions. He couldn't stop listening to them one after another.

"Sam!" His mother wrapped on his bedroom door. "It's supper time. Get down, I've called you three times."

"Coming," He muttered taking the headphones off. It was five o' clock. All he had done for the last two hours was listen to Mp3s.

"What were you doing in there? Never mind, I really don't want to know." He hears her shuffle off downstairs, muttering all the way.

He paused before going downstairs to actually look at the person who sent the email. Kurt Hummel. He quickly (and with some difficulty) read the message.

Sam,

Here is about 60 Mp3s of solos and duets I have performed for Glee or as an extracurricular. I'm not asking you to listen to all of them, but listen to a few and send me back some song suggestions. Don't worry about sending me any of you singing, just try to give me an idea of the songs you think we'll sound good on together.

-Kurt.

Kurt had been the one singing all those songs? Sam was suddenly really excited about their duet project.

Except for when it ended up not happening. Maybe Kurt had heard him in the showers before or something, and didn't think he was talented enough. Maybe Finn had something to do with it. Probably Finn.

Kurt didn't have to act so happy about it though.

Le Jazz Hot had been an interesting performance. It was a weird sort combination of Kurt's performance styles. The one good thing about not doing the duet with Kurt was getting to see him perform like that. As he clapped for Kurt at the end of the performance, he wondered what song Kurt would sing in front of the glee club next.

Except he never found out. He didn't hear Kurt sing again until April the next year. The day he came back to Dalton, after they stood around listening to Blaine sing a song to Kurt they went in and Kurt told everyone there was song he wanted to sing. To them. To McKinley in a way. It was that moment where Sam finally realized that he had began to think about Kurt as angel.

The way he sang to song was very similar to the way he sang "I Want to Hold Your Hand", in that it was a very emotional performance. It was different however. It was song of joy, not of sadness. The relief of being home after a long time away and being held by loved ones.

Sam couldn't even bring himself to smile. All he could do was sit their and look at Kurt with awe making a discovery he wasn't sure he had wanted to.

The choir stops singing after one song, thank God and sits back down on their wooden benches. The priest asks everyone to pray. To pray for the world's hungry and helpless, and the hungry and helpless nearer to home.

Sam feels the looks that people sitting around him are giving his family. Pity filled and in some cases fear filled looks, knowing that they could just as easily lose their jobs as his Dad had, and end up living in motels or even their cars with their children. He hates the pity more then anything else to be honest. He can deal with staring or mocking more then pity. He looked over at Quinn again who was also looking at them. He knew Quinn wasn't one of the people who was pitying his family at the moment. She had dealt with that herself all last year, when she wasn't being called a 'slut' or a 'whore', either behind her back or to her face, and would never inflect it on another person. They had always understood each other. It helped that many ways they were the same person. All bad ways though.

Kurt seemed perfectly fine after their duet got canceled, and they never spoke to each other after that day in the shower room. Sam had tried to complement him after Le Jazz Hot, but Kurt just breezed right past him, simply giving a pleasant nod and smile in acknowledgment.

And so their lives went on. Sam got caught up in dating Quinn and trying to beat Finn-in a perfectly friendly matter of course- to think about Kurt. Other then maybe that his Riffraff performance in the RHPS rehearsals were awesome and perfectly in character or that he had the best ideas for the boys vs. girls mashup competition. He felt guilty about that in retrospect considering what was going down at the time with Karofsky.

Ah Karofsky. Sam had never been exactly fond of him or the rest of the football team. Too much like the guys at the St. Andrew's Boys School, who had enjoyed punching anyone who was even somewhat different. Worse than them when it came to it. But when he said those things about Kurt, any chance of Sam ever liking him was gone. Shoving Mike into Artie was just the icing on the cake. But that and the promise for it to be better hadn't done anything. Kurt was gone. For good it seemed at the time.

After that, he only saw Kurt three times before regionals: sectionals, Valentine's day, and Rachel's party. Every time he saw Kurt he seemed a little less then Kurt like. Quieter, more withdrawn, more likely to be lost in crowd then to standout as brightly as a star in one. It wasn't too surprising. Sam knew first hand how private schools then to suck out someone's individually. Though he wonder if it wasn't the new person he'd seen Kurt hanging off was the cause of it.

Regionals had painted a particularly grim picture. Candles was the first thing he'd actually really heard Kurt sing where he wasn't melting into the background since Le Jazz Hot, and it was….was there a nice word for it? Horrible. Kurt was not in his natural key at all, and for this song at least his and Blaine's voices didn't match at all. And why were they looking at each other like that when they were singing those lyrics? Did they even realize the words they were singing? Everyone around him had big cheesy grins on their faces, so maybe it was just him. It just seemed like every time he saw Kurt he was less and less like the confident and talented person who had boldly introduced himself to Sam and asked to be his duet partner.

He wasn't thinking too much about Kurt during that time though. After everything that had happened with Finn and Quinn and his family, most of what he thought about was how to do his math homework in the ten minutes before class started because he had worked a double pizza delivery shift the night before. Or about how to sneak leftover pizza home for Stacie, Stevie and his parents.

That was until the night he had to deliver pizzas to Dalton Academy.

When his boss handed him the address, he had been both nervous and excited. Excited because it meant higher tips. These were rich kids, not just some teenagers holding a party while their parents were out of town. They could afford to give him more. He was nervous about running into Kurt though. He would know just like that.

But it was suppose to be a big campus right? He'd probably never even catch one glance of each other.

Until he found out that he was suppose to deliver it directly to the Warbler council room.

They meet him just outside the room.

"That will be $85.50," Sam says looking down at the ground.

"So what are you saving for?" Kurt asks while, Blaine rifles through his wallet after cheerfully proclaiming that everything was on him.

"Saving?" Sam realizes that Kurt just thinks he's trying to raise some extra money to buy a surfboard or something. "Oh I just thought that Mr. Schue could use some extra money to pay for the wheelchair bus for Artie."

"Oh how very nice."

"Here you go!" Blaine smiles handing him the money.

Sam starts to count it quickly. Aside from the possibility of running into Kurt, he had been looking forward to this job. Private school kids should have a little extra for tipping than your average drunken teenage house party, right?

The count came to $87.00.

"Thanks," Sam manges to smile tensely at Blaine, who nods and motions for his merry bunch of warblers to follow after him. Kurt remains where he's standing though.

"Aren't you coming?" One of them calls after him.

"I'll be there in a minute. I just want to ask Sam some questions about New Directions."

The boy in question shrugs and runs after the rest of the group despite the two pizzas he's holding.

"I'm not going to help you spy on New Directions, dude." Sam laughs as he starts to turn. "It was cool to see you though. Guess the next time will be at Regionals right?"

"Why were you so disappointed with Blaine's tip?"

Sam pauses and turns back to Kurt. This was pretty much what he had feared ever since his boss had given him an order to Dalton. He tries to think of a convincing lie (even to tell Kurt that he didn't even have this job really, and it was just a New Directions' plot to steal Warbler secrets for Regionals).

"Sam, what's wrong?" Kurt whispers stepping closer. "Are you okay?"

Maybe it was because it was the first time someone had asked him if he was okay in a long time, maybe it was just Kurt's kind eyes staring him down, but for whatever reason he broke down and told him everything.

By the end of his story, Kurt was balancing the pizza box on one hand, while stoking the other hand up and down Sam's arm trying to calm him down (Sam realized to his embarrassment that he had started shaking uncontrollably while he was telling the story). He had thought it would be dehumanizing to tell someone about it, but with that light weight on his arm and the fact the eyes didn't hold a shed of pity and instead concern, he felt almost warm inside. Like coming home after being out in the cold.

And so it began. Kurt would bring clothes for Sam to wear to school (so no one would notice when they started to smell and he couldn't afford laundry) or sometimes food (always claiming that he made too much in cooking class- Sam knew better). Most of all, he brought himself.

For the first time since, the Quinn and Finn thing in the winter, Sam felt like someone was listening to him. He tried to limit his talk about New Directions before Kurt came back, because he knew it upset him. Everything else was fair game though. Stupid stuff like the Nessie Club Artie, Mike and him had started to his relationship Santana to how he was worried that Stacie or Stevie might get taken away from them if it didn't look like they were getting enough to eat. Kurt talked to. About Blaine sometimes, or the stuffiness of the Warbler council (his impression of one of the members who said "you mock us, sir" was particularly hilarious). Sometimes, about his new family who Sam had only heard vague things about before. Once about his mother. Those conversations with Kurt on the front porch of their motel room, were the most free he ever felt during that point in his life. Quinn was great too, but because of how they ended things there was an awkwardness. Though to be honest, they had never been that easy around each other.

The kindness was a bit surprising. Not too much, since he had always kinda of knew it was there, but enough. Mainly it was that Kurt, who had been away for so long had been the one to reach out, before any of the members of New Directions who were more likely to be called 'kind' had noticed.

Kurt was still Kurt. A little snobbish, sarcastic and acted like he was superior to the majority of the people in the room. It kept Sam from being too in awe of him. But from that day at Dalton onwards he seemed to have a certain inner glow about him. All the time.

The forgiveness was another surprise. Sam tried to 'turn the other cheek' most of the time, but even he thought there was some people you couldn't forgive. Dave Karofsky was one of them. In Sam's mind a bully who pushed people in wheelchairs around and threatened to kill people didn't really deserve that kind of forgiveness. The person most wronged by him had a different opinion though.

"He's going through a hard time," Kurt sighed when Sam asked him one night outside the motel. "And he's started to make a change. Don't worry I didn't forget anything and I'm on my guard, but there's no real point in holding a grudge if I can be back home in time for Nationals."

"What kinda of hard time?" Sam asked. All he got was a look that implied he should be the last person asking to hear about things people rather keep private.

But that ability for forgiveness had come into an even bigger play only the night before. At prom.

Unable to shout slurs at him or push into lockers anymore, under the threat of the Bully Whips or lone New Directions members in the hallways, the students of McKinley had to find other methods to bring down Kurt. Like voting him Prom Queen.

It was shocking. Everybody had thought for a second even, that McKinley had finally became a safe place for people to be themselves (how much they actually believed it deep down was up for debate). When Kurt ran through the double doors, nobody had expected him to come back that evening. Or at all. Most of the people at the prom wouldn't have. Sam knew he definitely wouldn't have.

Kurt did come back though. And simply accepted the crown with grace. Not a trace of bitterness or despair that he doubtless felt. He was forgiving them all over again.

In that moment he seemed to shine more than ever with that inner glow. Like the angel in the stain glass window.

In the parking lot, after church Quinn waved him over. He smiled wide and practically ran over to her.

"Good morning,"

"Morning," He pauses. "Sorry about the prom thing. Finn getting kicked out must have sucked."

And you lost your dream of Prom Queen. He adds in his head. It had been their dream once to share that honor. Not so much anymore.

"I was fine," She forces a smile. "Someone else had a bit of a worse time."

Sam licks his lips, putting his hands in his pockets. "Do you think he's okay?"

"I don't see why not. After all Blaine's was with him afterwards, so it couldn't have been too bad."

Ah yes Blaine. Blaine and Kurt. Klaine as Finn liked to call it, with his and Rachel's obsession with giving all the couples smoshed names.

Blaine singing with Kurt on Valentine's Day at Breadstix. Singing 'Candles' together at Regionals. His arm around Kurt during the A Night of Neglect concert. Taking Kurt's hands to lead him away from New Directions-away from Sam-during 'Somewhere Only We Know'. Holding out his hand for Kurt so they could dance last night. Sam saw all the moments in his mind like a photo album. One with him always standing in the back upset. For reasons, that didn't make any sense.

Logically he should love Blaine. Blaine gave Kurt, Sam's best friend, all he had ever wanted. At least, that's what seemed like, and that's what Kurt had said on the motel's porch. He had always been personally nice to Sam. Yet he always felt intense dislike towards Blaine.

And it was scary. His dislike for Blaine linked those moments in the bathroom to how he viewed Kurt as an angel. And that was the last thing he wanted.

"Sam?" Quinn looks puzzled. "Sam?"

"Sorry," He smiles apologetically. "I'll see you tomorrow during morning Glee."

"Oh. Well, have a nice Sunday." She turns to head back to her mother's car, as Sam does the same.

He was a mess and not a very good person really. He was unwilling to forgive people, jealous and most of all he wasn't brave enough. Especially not after seeing everything that had happened to Kurt this year. Especially not after last night. It was scary out there. Maybe if he was sure there was someone waiting on the other end. However, that person was with someone else.

He sighs as he sits down next to Stevie in the backseat. He had promised to meet Mercedes for Brunch at Breadstix's at 11:30 am. She had asked him quietly when Rachel's dads had dropped him off at the motel last night. She was a nice girl.

His mother talking about the sermon with his father, in between the latest gossip from her friends. Stacie and Stevie are bouncing slightly in their car seats after having to sit still and be quiet for so long. He looks back at the stained glass window as they pull away from the church.

Mortals like Sam weren't meant for the angels.


End file.
